The court ruled that from later this month customers of Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media will no longer be able to visit the
Sweden-based website, which provides links to mostly copyrighted music
and videos. Another ISP, BT, has requested more time to consider its
response to the blocking order.

The move follows a request to
ISPs in November 2011 by a record label trade association, the British
Phonographic Industry
(BPI), to voluntarily block the site. The ISPs responded that they would
only do so under a court order - and that has now been granted.

"The
High Court has
confirmed that The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale,"
said BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor. "Its operators line their pockets
by commercially exploiting
music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who
created them. This is wrong. Musicians, sound engineers and video
editors deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else."

ISPs
will block the site using Domain Name Service (DNS) filtering, which
will prevent their customers' computers from translating The Pirate
Bay's domain name (thepiratebay.se) into its internet protocol (IP)
address, the sequence of numbers which gives the site's actual
coordinates on the internet. But such measures are trivial for dedicated
pirates to circumvent, either by using different DNS settings or an
anonymous connection service such as Tor.

"As usual there are easy ways to circumvent the block," says The Pirate Bay's latest blog post.
"It remains to be seen if the DNS blocking methods used by the ISPs
will be effective in reducing access to The Pirate Bay or other sites,"
agrees Greg Mead, CEO of download tracking firm Musicmetric.

Even
without access to The Pirate Bay, there are still many easy ways to get
hold of copyrighted media using torrent files, which have legitimate
applications as well as pirate uses. Google can be turn up torrent files if a user simply attaches the term "filetype:torrent" to a search.

"Blocking the Pirate Bay is pointless and dangerous," says Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group. "It will fuel calls
for further, wider and even more drastic Internet censorship
of many kinds, from pornography to extremism. Internet
censorship is growing in scope and becoming easier. Yet it never has the
effect desired. It simply turns criminals into heroes."

So if like me you already use Google's DNS servers for resolution of addresses then this "block" will not effect me?

Travis
on May 1, 2012 5:11 PM

LMAO what about the other hundred torrent sites. Take the big one down and the next ones traffic quadruples in hours.

Gordon McIntosh
on May 1, 2012 5:53 PM

So basically you only have to add the IP address of the site to your local hosts file. They really thought that one through..

Cheapjack
on May 2, 2012 12:17 AM

When they attempt to block porn at source, and you have to ask for it, it would be worrying. Given the hacking scandal, and the fact that kids bribe each other sexually on Facebook, there is the great possibility your tastes and capacity will be recorded, and used to bribe you or hinder your career. Employers monitor Facebook now. Kids will grow up thinking bribery is normal and some of those monitoring now do.

Tory Cooper
on May 2, 2012 12:45 AM

Art is shared for recognition only, to make a profit is greed. The artists and engineers make how much compared to the companies and corporations selling their music or video content? IE walmart, fyi, hastings etc. If I buy music or movies, I will pay who deserve it. The artists. No company involvement except for a company that stores the content online. CD's, DVD's and any other form of media storage is unnecessary, waist of resources, pollutant and costly in the age of computers and internet. Artist can preform in public if they want to make money on a product that needs no plastic to store it on. Should I plug my ears if someone is playing a song in their vehicle and I do not own it. Media companies need to be taxed to death. CEO shot and common sense used by all.

Graham
on May 2, 2012 1:27 AM

I'm sure this will deter some people, but it will likely cause the majority of current users to either bookmark the IP address or use an alternative DNS. Most people I know currently aren't using their ISP's DNS anyway.

Marcwolf
on May 2, 2012 8:01 AM

The biggest issue is not that this site can be blocked.. but rather that the mechanism is being developed to block a site.
Today it is a Pirate Software site, but tomorrow it could be easily civil right group, or a site covering things that an authority might not want it's public to know.
To quip. Who Watches the Watchers.

Jon
on May 2, 2012 8:10 AM

Pathetic! Totally pathetic!

Switch to Google's DNS server to get the IP address. Or simply write it down. You don't need DNS if you already know the IP address. That is what DNS does - it translates human readable stuff into an IP address. You can just stick the IP address into the address bar instead of the name and off you go.

Just how stupid these High Court judges, and indeed the ISPs are, beggars belief.

Thank God!

Sharing is Caring
on May 2, 2012 8:37 AM

Copyright is just another word used by the capitalists to exploit their workers and the consumers.

Th only solution for this issue is vpn.. With a vpn you can continue to use torrent and to bypass restrictions with no problem...

Rodney
on May 2, 2012 2:18 PM

The worse case scenario, block all torrent servers. OK, everyone switches to the virtualised, distributed bittorent server that exists as a cloud on the distributed database. The first code is already available, and is also being used for creating a virtualised search engine and other fully distributed data services.

Other researchers have been encoding not just data, but actual executable logic structures in ping codes only, the computation being carried out between the interaction of the prescence or abscence of a ping pulse and the configuration of the network, very similarly to the brain.

We already have teh code available to remove all existance of measureable data from the internet, while leaving far more easily accessible data on each terminal and client.

Given this is what the goverment and military would love to have, for security, they have the problem of allowing Everyone to use the technology, making it necessary to use physical interference to deal with criminals, or letting Noone use it, in which case the criminals can walk through so called goverment and military security with impunity.

Stavros
on May 2, 2012 8:23 PM

It seems that this is actually an IP block rather than a DNS block, but it barely makes any difference. As you would expect, in the minutes after the block went into place, every corner of the internet is awash with people laughing at its ineffectiveness and posting ways to get around it.

David UK
on May 3, 2012 2:02 AM

The ridiculous part about this is that thepiratebay doesn't actually house any content. It posts magnet links to files containing hashtags that allow your pc to then relay to the bittorrent channels around the world to download.
It's like shutting down an airport and saying you've stopped drug muling.

There are plenty of ways to get around ISP blocks. The main one is using a proxy server. The problem is that the magnet links don't work over a proxy. However, you can access it here: www.piratebayuk.co.uk it has its own custom built proxy which is the only one that can handle the magnet links

"the Sweden-based website, which provides links to mostly copyrighted music and videos."
No it doesn't. They don't even provide Torrents anymore. They allow users to search for 'Magnet Links' (look it up).
There is no actual pirated software or media on the site. There never has been.
But all the idiots campaigning for their copyright protection have no clue how it works, so they are targeting the wrong people.

It's the spreading of misinformation like in this article which is only making this colossal screw-up of internet censorship even worse. Following these lines, youtube and google will be next on the block list.